Editors' Note
Two entities converge when advances and time channel them to the same point. This is an appropriate way to characterize and address converging research in life sciences and engineering, computation, and physical sciences.
The story of convergence starts in 1953 when molecular ... Read More

Author: Phillip A. Sharp and Robert Langer

Fall Issue of The Bridge on the Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences

Nanotechnology has matured over the past 20 years from a field focused on understanding miniaturization and its consequences to one defined by the rational design, synthesis, and manipulation of nanoscale objects. Many advances in nanotechnology have had an extraordinary impact specifically on the ... Read More

The immune system provides protection from infectious pathogens, and its aberrant regulation is implicated in several diseases. Vaccination, one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine, is evidence that the immune system can be harnessed and manipulated to improve the human condition. But ... Read More

Author: Arup K. Chakraborty and Mark M. Davis

Fall Issue of The Bridge on the Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences

Definitions of systems biology are as broad ranging as the field itself. An early offering was from the Institute for Systems Biology:
Systems biology does not investigate individual genes or proteins one at a time, as has been the highly successful mode of biology for the past 30 years. ... Read More

Author: Douglas A. Lauffenburger and Kathleen M. Giacomini

Fall Issue of The Bridge on the Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences

Since time immemorial literature and art have depicted the desire to recreate or regenerate human life or to transplant parts from one individual to another. An early example is the Fra Angelico painting Healing of Justinian , which showed the transplantation in the third century AD of an ... Read More

Author: Cato T. Laurencin, George Q. Daley, and Roshan James

Fall Issue of The Bridge on the Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences

Over the past half-century the semiconductor industry developed a powerful set of manufacturing tools that enable highly parallel fabrication of electronic devices with an extraordinarily large number of integrated components. A key part of this process is the use of lithographic techniques to ... Read More

Author: Stephen R. Quake

Fall Issue of The Bridge on the Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences

For centuries a principal goal of science has been, first, to understand life at its most basic level and, second, to learn to control it. René Descartes (1596–1650), a pioneer of optics most often associated with “I think, therefore I am,” looked forward in his Discourse ... Read More

Author: Jay D. Keasling and J. Craig Venter

Fall Issue of The Bridge on the Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences